This Week in DVD & Blu-ray is a column that compiles all the latest info regarding new DVD and Blu-ray releases, sales, and exclusive deals from stores including Target, Best Buy and Fry’s.

EDGE OF DARKNESS
Lest you be fooled by the trailer, Edge of Darkness is not an action thriller; it’s a drama thriller, with sporadic moments of action. Those moments also happen to be by far the best thing about it. The rest, meanwhile, doesn’t make much of an impression, leaving us with a collective total of 5-10 great minutes in an otherwise fairly middling 2 hours. Would the film have fared better had it delivered straight-up action all the way through? I doubt it. The action works as well as it does because of the way it punctuates the drama, with superbly orchestrated bursts of violence forcefully grabbing you by the throat during times of quiet dread. The problem with the movie is that its story is stuck in the ’80s, back when the original British TV serial first aired. 25 years later, the conspiracy at the core of Edge of Darkness is as arid and familiar as the political subtext that comes with it. The closer I came to the mystery being unraveled, the less I cared what the truth was. It’s lucky then, that the film has Mel Gibson’s brooding intensity to keep the proceedings engaging. I may not have had any interest in what sort of dastardly deeds Craven’s daughter had uncovered, but I was eager to see what Craven was going to do about it. The payoff did not disappoint.Available on Blu-ray? Yes.Notable Extras: DVD – Additional scenes. Blu-ray – Includes everything on the DVD, as well as 9 Focus Point video pods (“Scoring the Film”, “Revisiting the Edge of Darkness Mini-series”, “Edge of Your Seat”, “Making a Ghost Character Real”, “Adapting the Edge of Darkness Mini-series”, “Director Profile Martin Campbell”, “Boston as a Character”, “Mel’s Back”, “Craven’s War of Attrition”), a digital copy of the film, and a copy of the DVD.

You can always e-mail us at slashfilmcast(AT)gmail(DOT)com, or call and leave a voicemail at 781-583-1993. Join us in next weekon at 9 PM EST / 6 PM PST at Slashfilm’s live page as we review The Lovely Bones.

We don’t have as many big new posters dropping at the end of the year as we do trailers, but a few new images have cropped up for films that premiere early in 2010. It’s mostly horror and thriller stuff, but then there’s a new image for the Mark and Michael Polish movie Stay Cool, the existence of which I’d completely forgotten. (And, no, that’s not another film in line with Get Shorty and Be Cool.) See all the images after the break.

Edit: You may see a so-called teaser poster for Predators lurking around today, but it’s just a temp image cobbled together for an international website showing Fox’s upcoming slate. It’s not a legit teaser. We’ll run the real thing when it arrives.

We haven’t talked much about Daybreakers, the upcoming vampire film by writer/director siblings Michael and Peter Spierig, but the release of the film’s extended TV trailer seems reason enough to shed some light on it. The film stars Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe in a world where vampires rule, and humans are a minority hunted for blood. In the trailers it’s revealed that the vampires blood supply is dwindling, and that they’re searching for a synthetic blood substitute. There’s also talk of a “cure”—apparently the worldwide vampirism was caused by a plague of some sort.

Steve (from Collider) and I usually record our video blog’s in separate locations through the magic of the internet, but since we’re both attending this year’s Toronto Film Festival, we’ve decided to record some video blogs talking about some of the movies we’ve seen at the festival. We’ve tried to keep the video blogs short and to the point, but, as always, it sometimes goes longer than planned. But if you know us, that’s to be expected.

Anyway, after the jump you can watch Peter and I talk about the new Michael Cera movie Youth in Revolt and The Spierig Brothers vampire film Daybreakers. We liked both of the films, and you can find out why in the video blogs below. Also, while some movies at the festival won’t hit theaters for another year, Youth in Revolt arrives in late October and Daybreakers hits theaters this January.

Every September, Fantastic Fest, America’s greatest genre film festival, is held in Austin Texas at the greatest movie theater in the world: The Alamo Drafhouse. Last month Fantastic Fest announced that Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess‘ new film Gentlemen Broncos would be opening up this year’s fest, and 32 first wave films were also revealed. This morning Tim League unveiled the second half of the Fantastic Fest content, which includes gala premieres of Zomblieland, George Romero‘s new zombie film Survival of the Dead, and Daybreakers, as well as a list of other film discoveries which you can read more about after the jump.